Thank you, Keith.
Governor and Mrs. Wilson, Mr. And Mrs. Wick, Trustees of the President Reagan Library and Museum, all of you who have served your country, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
It is an honor and a pleasure to be with you today as Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet’s representative on the occasion of the opening of this unique exhibit. The Director sends his regrets that he cannot be here personally but, as you would expect, he is fully engaged with the war against terrorism. Under different circumstances, I can assure you that he would have been delighted to come to this superb library in this wonderful setting to speak to you personally.
Never before has such an exhibit been done on this scale. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum have collaborated in this endeavor to promote a deeper understanding of the role of intelligence in the Presidential decision making process and in the American system of government.
The CIA, which has the best museum you’ve never seen, has opened its vaults for this occasion, loaning approximately 60 historically significant artifacts—several of them recently declassified and on display here publicly for the first time.
An additional 76 rare and exceptional artifacts are on loan courtesy of Mr. Keith Melton, whose splendid private collection of espionage equipment numbers close to 7,000 pieces, making it the largest private collection of espionage paraphernalia in the world.
Keith is a national treasure. His commitment to telling the story of significant events in history from an intelligence perspective — in documentary films, books and exhibits like this one — serves an important public service. One of Keith’s greatest coups as a collector occurred when he obtained—during one of his artifact collecting trips to the former Soviet Union—a piece of the wreckage from Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 reconnaissance aircraft shot down by the Soviets in 1960. It is here in the exhibit. Keith assures us that he could recover the entire aircraft if he could just make 1700 more trips. We are all very grateful to Keith for lending his support to this exhibit.
I also want to thank Danny Biederman, who has loaned to the Library for this exhibit some of his collection of Hollywood spy memorabilia. Hollywood has long been fascinated with the world of espionage, and, of course, most of its portrayals of the intelligence business are pure fantasy. There was an occasion, however, when Hollywood and the CIA collaborated to pull off one of the great clandestine exfiltration operations in history.
In January 1980, a team of CIA officers from our Office of Technical Services (OTS), posed as members of an advance party from a film production company. They entered Iran documented as non-Americans ostensibly looking for a site to shoot a science fiction film. With the help of the Canadian government and its brave diplomats the OTS team successfully spirited out of the country six US State Department employees who had taken refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran after Iranian militants had taken over the US Embassy and held 52 American diplomats hostage for several months. As you know, the Iranian Government freed the 52 hostages on the day President Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981. The extraordinary success of the exfiltration operation was made possible, in part, by the cooperation of a group of patriotic Hollywood professionals who gave their advice and support to the operation. Without them, we would never have been able to create a truly believable production company to cover our activities in Iran. This episode has now been declassified, and those of you who would like to read more about it can find an article on the operation entitled, “The CIA Goes Hollywood: A Classic Case of Deception,” on the CIA’s public web site in a journal we publish called Studies In Intelligence.
The ingenious men and women of CIA’s Office of Technical Services equip and train America’s shadow warriors to locate our adversaries, sabotage their plans, infiltrate and exfiltrate hostile territory, communicate the enemy’s secret intentions, verify secret sources, and cleverly hide spy tools. The exhibit includes some of the subminiature cameras and concealment devices developed in the past by OTS to support secret operations. As Duke noted, we know via the James Bond films the fictional head of the British Technical Service as “Q”. The Director of CIA’s Office of Technical Services leads a group of creative individuals whose motto is “Imagine what is possible – then prepare to be amazed.”
I also want to thank Duke Blackwood and the multi-talented staff of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for their superb work in creating this exhibit. And, I want to thank the Board of Trustees for the opportunity to present this visual lesson on the history of intelligence.
As you visit the exhibit, I ask you to keep in mind that the examples of tradecraft displayed here are only some of the tools of our trade. What is more important to remember is that the CIA and the rest of the US Intelligence Community exist to give accurate, timely, and comprehensive intelligence to the President of the United States, to his national security team, to our war fighters and to all the other elements of our national security apparatus. We are doing so today in Afghanistan, the Balkans and anywhere America’s security and vital interests are threatened. No Chief Executive understood this better than President Reagan, who once told the CIA’s employees during a visit to the Agency’s Headquarters, “Whether you work in Langley or a faraway nation, whether your tasks are in operations or analysis, it is upon your intellect and integrity…that the fate of freedom rests for millions of your countrymen and for many millions more all around the globe. Without you, our nation’s safety would be more vulnerable and our security fragile and endangered. You, the men and women of the CIA, are the eyes and ears of the free world.”
President Reagan entered office with a clear vision of what he wanted from the Intelligence Community and how he expected to use it to conduct foreign policy. He chose a Vice-President who had been a former Director of Central Intelligence, George Herbert Walker Bush, and he chose a Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, who shared the President’s vision.
Director Casey was a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s World War II intelligence agency, and he brought with him to CIA the toughness, the drive, the daring, and the inventiveness that were hallmarks of the OSS. Under President Reagan’s leadership, Director Casey rebuilt the capabilities of the CIA and the entire US Intelligence Community, following a decade of investigations, personnel cuts and slashed budgets, that resulted in decreasing capability and, consequently, flagging morale. We in CIA particularly recall with pride and thankfulness the President’s commitment to our mission, his unwavering support of the men and women of CIA, and his leadership in restoring the Agency’s sense of pride and purpose. We are still benefiting from the human and material resources President Reagan provided.
A key element of President Reagan’s strategy to confront threats to US national security was the controversial decision he and Director Casey took to revive covert action as an instrument of statecraft. They both saw this initiative as necessary to confront the Soviet Union and its surrogates wherever they were supporting totalitarian regimes or seeking to destabilize fragile democracies.
At first, the President and his Director had the Agency focus its efforts on the periphery of the Soviet empire—in such places as Angola and Nicaragua. This followed the pattern set by the Carter Administration, although Director Casey quickly stepped up the tempo of those operations when he took over as Director of Central Intelligence. Soon, however, the President and Mr. Casey focused their attention on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as the place where Moscow would be most vulnerable to a strategically significant defeat. They were right, and Western support for the Mujahedin turned Afghanistan into a quagmire for the Soviet Union, one in which there was no hope for victory. There are those who claim, not without merit, I think, that the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan began the unraveling of the Soviet system, leading ultimately to its collapse not long after President Reagan left office.
Less well known to the public but equally important, in my view, in contributing to the ultimate downfall of the Soviet Union was President Reagan’s support for the Solidarity labor and political movement in Poland over the course of his administration. During the first National Security Council meeting held after the Polish regime imposed martial law in 1981 in order to repress the Solidarity movement, Mr. Reagan said, “I took a stand that this may be the last chance in our lifetime to see a change in the Soviet Empire’s colonial policy regarding Eastern Europe.”
As the President anticipated, Solidarity’s survival in the face of Communist repression paved the way for the collapse of Communism in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. And, of course, the events in Eastern Europe eventually undercut the ability of the Soviet Union to maintain itself as a multi-ethnic empire united only by the threat of force and a dying ideology.
President Reagan’s interest in the Agency was not limited to its use of covert action. He was a voracious consumer of intelligence. With all the demands on his time, he set aside 30 minutes every day for a national security briefing. At the end of each session, the President received a maroon, leather-bound book containing the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB as we call it.
The PDB contains the most sensitive information the Agency—and the US Intelligence Community—has available to it on the most important issues a President must face every day. The fact of the PDB’s existence was only declassified in the early 1990s. This exhibit provides a rare glimpse of one of the PDB binders that CIA prepares for our current Commander-in-Chief, President George W. Bush. The binder’s contents, of course, had to remain in the vault at CIA Headquarters at Langley.
One of President Reagan’s National Security Council aides told us that Mr. Reagan “was the most incredible listener, and fact-and information-absorber I ever saw.” He “read the PDB page-for-page, word-for-word every day.”
Another feature that distinguished the President as an intelligence consumer was his instinct. In the early 1980’s, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who was working as a spy for British intelligence, reported that the Kremlin had come to the conclusion that the United States was preparing to launch a surprise nuclear attack against the USSR—an episode we call the War Scare. Although some professional intelligence officers dismissed these reports out of hand as Soviet disinformation, the President checked on the reporting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who vouched for Gordievsky. Mr. Reagan thereafter read the reports from Gordievsky with deep and abiding interest. Later, the President asked to meet Mr. Gordievsky. You will see a photo in this exhibit of the two of them together. Gordievsky’s reports caused the President to reflect long and hard about the possibility of nuclear war and led him to embark on the path of seeking major reductions in the number of nuclear arms deployed by the superpowers. The President would not have been able to take this course had he not had full confidence in the ability of the Intelligence Community to verify the arms control treaties he began negotiating—“trust but verify” was his watchword — with America’s Intelligence Community providing the verification.
In this endeavor, the CIA and the other members of the Intelligence Community may well have made their most important contribution of the Cold War. As former DCI Bob Gates wrote in his book, From the Shadows, “The great continuing strength and success of the analysts of CIA and the intelligence community was in describing with amazing accuracy from the late 1960s until the Soviet collapse the actual military strength and capabilities of the Soviet Union…. Perhaps the intelligence community’s greatest contribution was that during the last half of the Cold War, there were no significant strategic surprises…. Our detailed knowledge of Soviet forces and capabilities after the middle of the 1960s made it virtually impossible for the Soviets to bluff us, and this helped prevent miscalculations and misunderstandings that could have destroyed the world.”
We in the Central Intelligence Agency are proud of the role intelligence played in helping President Reagan achieve his national security goals for the nation during his years in office. I hope you’ll enjoy this exhibit and come away with a deeper appreciation of the role US intelligence plays in our nation’s affairs. Thank you.